Chillblast Fusion Frigate Gaming PC
The Fusion Frigate Gaming PC is a fast system today that can become a gaming powerhouse tomorrow
Chillblast is unique in this month’s Labs, taking the decision to install a water cooler rather than an air cooler. And not just in its most expensive PC, the Fusion Cruiser ( see p91), but also this sub-£1,000 system. Technically, it costs £999.99 inc VAT, although we round up the 99p to a pound.
While its more expensive sibling includes an eight-core Ryzen 7
5800X, the Fusion Frigate employs a Core i5-11600K chip. As the “K” suffix indicates, this can be overclocked, but the main benefit of the water cooler in this case is that the i5-11600K is a chip that likes to run hot. If Chillblast had opted for an air cooler, we suspect this PC would be much noisier: it barely makes a noise when idling, and whilst it does skip up the gears when pushed it’s never irritating.
As our graphs on p92 emphasise, this is also a speedy machine for the money. An overall score of 310 in the
PC Pro benchmarks is excellent for a PC based on a six-core processor, and it’s notable that it was only beaten in multicore tests by the two systems based on the Ryzen 7 5800X.
It provided similarly stellar scores in our single-core tests. Again, the graphs tell the main story, but note its win in the Geekbench 5 single-core test in particular. If you’re looking for straight-line speed, the Fusion Frigate is an excellent choice.
This would normally be borne out in the gaming results too, but here Chillblast is restricted by budget. The GeForce GTX 1650 is a fine mid-range card, but it’s far more comfortable at 1080p than 1440p. For instance, it managed 38fps at 1080p in Metro
Exodus at High settings, but this dropped to 28fps at 1440p (and 16fps at 4K). Shadow of the Tomb Raider saw a similar drop-off, with 58fps at 1080p, 38fps at 1440p and 19fps at 4K.
Hitman 2 is arguably our toughest test, with 2x super sampling in particular. With this applied, we saw 21fps at 1080p and 10fps at 1440p. Only by dropping super sampling to 1x could we get playable results, with 71fps at 1080p. The simple lesson here? Tough games will struggle, so you will need to sacrifice. It’s worth noting that the PCSpecialist Fusion R scored higher thanks to its GTX
1660 Super card, but the only way to make a significant jump in performance is to opt for an RTX card.
Fortunately, such an upgrade is easy to make thanks to Chillblast’s choice of case and power supply. The latter is a superb 650W Corsair unit with a Gold 80 Plus rating for efficiency, and even when we pushed this PC to its limit it only peaked at 299W – so there’s plenty of potential to add a much hungrier graphics card. And we know there’s room in the case for an RTX 3000 series card because Chillblast uses the same chassis for the Fusion Cruiser with its RTX 3060 inside.
The Gigabyte B560M DS3H motherboard is another solid choice, with a decent amount of expansion despite its microATX proportions. The two spare DIMM sockets are easy to reach if you want to boost the supplied 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM, and there’s a second M.2 slot beneath the graphics card. There is one PCI Express x1 slot free as well, but this is very close to the bottom of the graphics card so we don’t fancy your chances of exploiting it.
Chillblast does its usual excellent job of tidying away cables, and one of the benefits of the GameMax Commando case is that there are two tucked-away caddies (you need to remove the right-hand side) for 3.5in drives. You’ll probably need to take advantage, too, as there’s only room in Chillblast’s budget for a 500GB
SSD: a Seagate FireCuda 520 that topped our sequential read tests.
The case includes a tempered glass side for you to gaze through, but you’ll need to buy your own RGB lighting or select it at the time of your order. Instead, Chillblast adds colour through three frontmounted fans. We ended up switching off the lights because the stickers in the middle weren’t quite centred, meaning the top and bottom one seemed to wobble.
This minor quibble aside, Chillblast has put together an excellent mid-range system with potential to grow into a gaming powerhouse.